“Not entirely,” Bessian said. “I have some knowledge of the Kanun myself, and I can imagine what you are dealing with.”
“I count the wounds, classify them, and do nothing else.”
For the first time Bessian had the feeling that the doctor was getting irritated. He turned to Diana, but their eyes did not meet. There was no question that this discussion would not make a good impression on her, but he told himself, too bad; provided that this comes to a stop as soon as possible, and we can get away from here.
“Perhaps you know that, according to the Kanun, the wounds inflicted are paid for by fines. Each wound is paid for individually, and the price depends on the part of the body in which the wound is situated. The compensation for head wounds, for example, is twice as high as that for wounds on the trunk, the latter being divided into two further categories, according to whether they are about or below the waist, and there are further distinctions. My work as an assistant consists of this only—to determine the number of the wounds and where they occur.”
He looked at Bessian and then at his wife, as if he wanted to be sure of the effect of his words.
“Wounds present problems when it comes to rendering judgment—rather more problems than outright killing. You must know that by the terms of the Kanun, a wound that has not been compensated for by the payment of a fine is regarded as the equivalent of half of a man’s blood. A wounded man, accordingly, is considered to be half-dead, a kind of shadow. In short, if someone wounds two persons in a family, or the same person twice, he becomes, by virtue of that fact—if he has not paid compensation for each of the two wounds considered separately—a debtor to the extent of all of one man’s blood, which is to say a human life.”
The doctor fell silent for a moment to give them time to absorb the meaning of his words.
“All that,” he went on, “gives rise to extremely complicated problems, principally economic ones. You are looking at me as if you are surprised, aren’t you? There are families that are unable to pay the compensation for two wounds, and they choose to discharge the debt by taking a human life. There are others that are ready to ruin themselves, to pay for as many as twenty wounds received by the victim, in order to keep the right, once their victim is well again, to murder him. Strange, isn’t it? But here’s something that puts all that in the shade. I know a man from the Black Ravines, who has supported his family for years on the indemnities he has received for the wounds his enemies have inflicted. He has escaped death several times, and he is convinced that, thanks to the training that he has had, he can escape dying by any bullet whatsoever, and without a doubt he is the first man in the world to create in some sense this new trade—that of making a living from his wounds.”
“Horrible,” Bessian muttered. He looked at Diana, and she seemed to him to be even more pale. This conversation must stop as soon as possible, he thought. Now the room at the inn, the fireplace, and the kettle of hot water hanging on the crane seemed far away. Let’s get away from here, he said to himself again. Let’s get away right now.
The people in the square had broken up into small groups, and Diana and Bessian were alone with the doctor.
“Perhaps you know,” the doctor went on—and Bessian was on the point of interrupting him and saying, I don’t know and I don’t want to know—“that according to the Kanun, when two men fire at each other point-blank and one of them dies while the other is merely wounded, the wounded man pays the difference, as it were for the surplus blood. In other words, as I told you right at the beginning, often, behind the semi-mythical décor, you have to look for the economic component. Perhaps you’ll accuse me of being cynical, but in our time, as with everything else, blood has been transformed into merchandise.”
“Oh, no,” Bessian said. “That’s a somewhat simplistic way of looking at things. Of course economics plays a part in many things, but it won’t do to go too far in that direction. And on that subject, I’d like to ask if you aren’t the person who wrote an article on the blood-feud that was banned by the royal censor.”
“No,” the doctor said shortly. “I supplied the facts, but I was not the author.”
“I think I remember reading in that article the same phraseology—blood has been turned into merchandise.”
“That is an incontestable truth.”
“Have you read Marx?” Bessian asked.
The doctor did not reply. He just looked at Bessian as if to say, “And you who are asking me that question, have you read him?”
Bessian glanced swiftly at Diana, who was looking straight before her, and he felt that he must argue with the doctor.
“In my opinion, even your explanation of the murder that you gave judgment on today is much too simplistic,” he said, hoping to find something that he could contradict.
“Not at all. I said it and I’ll repeat it. In every aspect of the events that were discussed today, it was purely a question of settling a debt.”
“Yes, a debt, certainly, but a debt of blood.”
“Blood, precious stones, cloth, it makes no difference. To me, it concerns a debt, and that is all.”
“It’s not the same thing.”
“It’s exactly the same thing.”
The doctor’s tone had become harsh. His delicate skin reddened as if it were burning. Bessian felt deeply offended.
“That is much too naive an explanation, not to say a cynical one,” he said.
The doctor’s eyes turned icy.
“You’re the one who’s naive, naive and cynical at the same time—you and your art.”
“You needn’t raise your voice,” said Bessian.
“I’ll yell my head off if I please,” the doctor said, though he lowered his voice at the same time. But, coming through his lips as if he were whistling, his voice sounded all the more threatening. “Your books, your art, they all smell of murder. Instead of doing something for these unfortunate mountaineers, you help death, you look for exalted themes, you look here for beauty so as to feed your art. You don’t see that this is beauty that kills, as a young writer said whom you certainly do not care for. You remind me of those theaters built in the palaces of Russian aristocrats, where the stage is large enough to accommodate hundreds of actors, while the living room can scarcely accommodate the prince’s family. That’s it. What you remind me of is those aristocrats. You encourage a whole nation to perform in a bloody drama, while you yourselves and your ladies watch the spectacle from your loges.”
At that moment Bessian noticed Diana’s absence. She had to be somewhere ahead of him, perhaps with the surveyor who would be sticking close to her, he thought, half-dazed.
“But you,” he said, “I mean you personally, you who are a doctor, who claim to understand things in the right way, why do you take part in this hoax? How about it? Why do you take advantage of that situation to earn your living?”
“When it comes to what I do, you’re absolutely right. I’m just a failure. But at least I understand what I am, and I don’t infect the world with my books.”
Bessian was looking for Diana, but he did not see her. From one point of view it was just as well that she had not heard those morbid opinions. The man went on talking and Bessian tried to listen, but as he himself was about to speak, instead of answering the doctor he said, as if he were talking to himself, “Where’s my wife?”
Now he was looking for her among the people who were still walking slowly to and fro in the church square.
“Diana!” he called, on the chance that she might hear him.
A number of people turned towards him.
“She may have gone into the church out of curiosity, or into a house to go to the bathroom.”
“That’s possible.”
They kept on walking, but Bessian was uneasy. I shouldn’t have left the inn, he thought.
“Forgive me,” the doctor said in a mild tone. “Perhaps I overdid it.”
“That’s nothing. Where can she have gone?”
�
��Don’t worry. She must be right in the neighborhood. Do you feel ill? You’re very pale.”
“No, no. I’m all right.”
Bessian felt the doctor’s hand take hold of his arm, and he wanted to move away, but he forgot to do it. Some children were keeping close to the nearest group of people, the one that included Ali Binak and the surveyor. Bessian felt his mouth go bitter. The lakes, he thought, for a second only. That old carpet of leaves, hopelessly rotten, covered over with that deceptive gold.
He was striding swiftly towards the group around Ali Binak. Is she drowned, he wondered while still some distance from them. But their faces were petrified. There was nothing in their expression that could give him reassurance.
“What is it?” he asked in panic, and unconsciously, perhaps because of the expression of those faces, instead of saying, “What has happened to her?” he said, “What has she done?”
The answer came with great difficulty from pitilessly clamped jaws. They had to repeat it to him several times before he could understand: Diana had gone inside the tower of refuge.
What had happened? Not at that moment, and not later, when the witnesses started to describe what they had seen (people felt immediately that it was one of those happenings that had an element of reality and at the same time an element of mist that separated it from normal life, and therefore that it was a happening that lent itself to the legendary), not at that time nor afterwards, then, could anyone establish precisely how the young woman from the capital had managed to get into the tower, where no stranger had ever set foot. And what was even more unlikely than the fact that she had entered there, was that no one had noticed it, or rather that if someone remembered that she had drawn away from the group, that she had wandered in the neighborhood, no one except for some children had paid enough attention to keep their eyes upon her. And she herself, perhaps, if she were questioned about the way in which she had gone down the road that far and had succeeded at last in entering, might she have been unable to explain anything at all? To judge by the few words that she had left behind her on the High Plateau, she would have felt at that moment something like detachment from everything, a kind of loss of gravity, which had lightened for her not only the idea of entering the tower but her going itself—all the way to the gate. And then, it should not be ignored that that very circumstance might help to turn people’s attention from her, and so allow her to take the fateful step. In fact, as some persons remembered thereafter, she had drawn away from the people in the square and approached the tower as lightly as a moth fluttering towards a lamp. She was flying, as it were, and carried along in that way like a leaf in the wind, she had gone inside—or rather, fallen across the threshold.
Bessian, his face ashen, understood at last what had happened. The first thing he did was to dart out to take his wife from that place, but strong hands seized both his arms.
“Let me go!” he shouted in a hoarse voice.
Their faces were aligned around his, unmoving as the stones of a wall. Among them was the pale face of Ali Binak.
“Let me go!” he said to him, though Ali was not one of those who were restraining him.
“Calm yourself, sir,” said Ali Binak. “You cannot go over there; no one can enter there, except for the priest.”
“But my wife is inside there,” Bessian cried. “Alone among those men.”
“You are quite right. Something must be done, but you may not go there. They could fire at you, you see. They might kill you.”
“Then have someone send for the priest, or for the Devil knows who, just so one can get inside.”
“The priest has been notified,” Ali Binak said.
“He’s coming! Here he is!” several voices said.
A small group had gathered around them. Bessian recognized his coachman, who was looking at him with eyes that seemed to be popping out of their sockets, expecting an order from him. But Bessian looked away.
“Move away!” Ali Binak said in a commanding tone. Some persons took a few steps only, and then stopped.
The priest came up, out of breath. His flabby face, with its heavy pockets beneath his eyes, looked very much alarmed.
“How long has she been inside?” he asked.
Ali Binak looked around questioningly. A number of persons spoke at once. One said half an hour, another an hour, and someone else a quarter of an hour. Most of those around shrugged their shoulders.
“That’s not important,” Ali Binak said. “What is needed is action.”
The priest and Ali Binak conferred with each other. Bessian heard Ali Binak say, “Then I’ll go with you,” and he took courage from that. In the crowd you could hear the words, “The priest is going there, together with Ali Binak.”
The priest walked off, followed by Ali Binak. After taking a few steps, Ali turned around and said to the crowd, “Stay where you are. They might shoot.”
Bessian felt that he was still being held by his arms. What is happening to me? he groaned inwardly. It seemed to him that the whole world was empty; all that was left was two forms in motion, the priest and Ali Binak, and the tower of refuge to which they were going.
He heard voices around him, like the distant whistling of a wind that was coming from another world. “They can’t shoot the priest, since he is protected by the Kanun, but there’s nothing to stop them from killing Ali Binak.” “No, I don’t think they’ll fire at Ali Binak either. Everyone knows who he is.”
The two men were halfway along when, suddenly, Diana appeared at the gate of the tower. Bessian could never remember clearly what happened at that moment. He remembered only that he had striven with all his strength to go to her, that his arms were gripped violently, and that voices said: Wait until she has come a bit farther, and she reaches the white stones. Then, again, he saw for a fleeting moment the figure of the doctor; he made another attempt to free himself and he heard the same voices trying to calm him.
At last Diana reached the white stones, and the men who were holding Bessian let him go, although one of them said, “Don’t let him go—he’ll kill her.” Diana’s face was white as a sheet. There was no sign of terror in it, nor pain, nor shame—only a frightening absence, especially in her eyes. Anxiously, Bessian looked for a tear in her clothing, a bluish stain on her lips or her neck, but he saw nothing of that kind. Then he heaved a sigh, and perhaps he would have felt relieved if there were not that emptiness in her eyes.
In a gesture that was not violent but not gentle either, he seized his wife’s arm, and walking ahead of her he drew her towards the carriage, and they got in one behind the other, without a word and without a wave to anyone.
The carriage rolled swiftly on the highroad. How long had they been travelling in this way—a minute, a century? At last Bessian turned to his wife.
“Why don’t you say something? Why don’t you tell me what happened?”
She sat motionless on the seat, looking straight ahead, as if she were somewhere else. Then he seized her by the elbow, violently, harshly.
“Tell me, what did you do in there?”
She did not answer, she did not try to draw away her arm that he was squeezing like a vise.
Why did you go there, he cried out within him. To see all the horror of the tragedy with your own eyes? Or to look for that mountaineer, That Gjorg. . . . Gjorg. I’ll search for you in tower after tower, eh?
He repeated those questions aloud, perhaps in other words though in the same order, but there was no answer, and he was sure that all those reasons together were responsible for that action. Suddenly, he felt a weariness such as he had never known.
Outside, night was falling. The twilight, together with the fog, spread swiftly along the road. Once he thought he saw beyond the window a man riding a mule. The traveller with the wan face whom Bessian thought he recognized followed the carriage for a short time. Where is the steward of the blood going in the dark, he wondered.
And you yourself, where are you going? He asked himself tha
t question a moment later. Alone in these alien highlands, in the dusk peopled with phantoms, where are you going?
Half an hour later, the carriage stopped in front of the inn. One behind the other, they climbed the wooden stairs and went into the room. The fire was still alight and the water-bucket, which the innkeeper had certainly filled again, was still there, black with soot. An oil lamp gave out a wavering light. Neither troubled with the fire or the bucket. Diana undressed and lay down, lying on her back, one arm drawn over her eyes to keep the lamplight from them. He stood by the window, his eyes on the window-pane, turning only momentarily to look at that fine arm with the silken strap that had slipped from her shoulder, covering the upper part of her face. What had they done to her, the half-blind Cyclops murderers in the tower? And he felt that the question might fill up all of a human life.
They stayed at the inn that night and all the next day without leaving their room. The innkeeper brought them their meals, surprised that they did not ask to have the fire lit in the fireplace.
In the morning of the following day (it was the seventeenth of April) the coachman put their bags in the carriage, and the two, having paid the innkeeper, said goodbye coldly and set out.
They were leaving the High Plateau.
* A colorless kind of spirits flavored with aniseed, distilled and drunk under many names in the Mediterranean and the Middle East.
CHAPTER VII
On the morning of the seventeenth of April, Gjorg was on the highroad that led to Brezftoht. Although he had been walking since dawn without a stop, he reckoned that it would take him at least another day to reach Brezftoht, while his bessa came to an end at noon today.
He raised his head in order to find the sun; the clouds, high in the sky, covered it over, but one could tell its position. It’s near to midday, he thought, and he turned his eyes to the road again. He was still dazed by the light overhead, and the road seemed to him to be strewn with reddish glints. While walking, he thought that if his bessa were over in the evening, walking very swiftly he might have been able to reach home around midnight. But, like most of the truces granted, this one was over at noon. It was well understood that if the man protected by the bessa was killed on the very day it expired, people would look to see in what direction lay the shadow of the dead man’s head. If the shadow was towards the east, that meant that he had been killed after midday, when the truce was no longer in force. If, on the contrary, the shadow was towards the west, that would show that he had been killed before the truce had expired, a cowardly act.
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